The Movement for Black Lives brought the old machinery back under new names. After Ferguson, Josh Williams — nineteen years old — drew eight years for a QuikTrip fire, the uprising's longest sentence; the FBI minted a "Black Identity Extremist" category, and its first target, Rakem Balogun, was jailed months on gun charges built from his Facebook posts before a judge threw the case out. Activists like Jasmine Abdullah were convicted of "felony lynching" — the anti-mob statute inverted against Black protest.

The 2020 George Floyd uprising produced the largest protest prosecution wave in U.S. history: federal charges against hundreds, decades-long arson sentences, and cases — from the Grand Rapids and Little Rock defendants to New York's Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis — that the movement's lawyers organized to defend as political cases, reviving the mass-defense tradition of the Panther era.